Cocoon House Analysis

Words: 930
Pages: 4

“In Ezra Stoller’s measterful photograph, the Healy Guest (or ‘Cocoon’) House perches at the very edge of the Bayou Louise.” On the right of the image, for the interior of the house, a pair of lightweight metal armchair and a tiny coffee table attract attention in contour opposite to the glass front wall. In the foreground of the image, on a cantilevered wooden deck over the water, a pair of slippers and a book casually sat on a low seating area, and four oranges on a glass table all imply an occupant who has just walked into the house but will be back for a second to pick the peeled orange up, open the book, and sit cheerfully back on the low wooden deck floor to read. In the background of the image, behind the receding lines of the building’s window wooden jalousies and diagonal metal rods, a boat, tied to a landing, nicely floated on the clear water. Beyond all these, a sandy beach and a group of trees on the horizon give way to a vast sky dramatically filled with clouds. By focusing on the inhabitant rather than the architecture, the image tends to make this house at least as much about lifestyle as about architecture. The Cocoon House is such a building that rejects entirely the restraining solid walls of conventional architectures. “The photograph immediately suggests some of the …show more content…
“The building seems more like a small garden pavilion than a real house. It suggests a fantasy that goes back to the time of the Romans at least, of an escape to a lift unencumbered by bulky necessities, one directly in contact with the land and the elements, and one in which all of the necessary supporting cast of characters could be banished from view.” It is not hard to understand that making the fantasy real was always very high price. However, the image here shows a vision of this simple but elegant retreat at a much humble scale and accessible to an American middle-class